i'm not sure what's meant by 'it's not realisitic to expect everyone to go vegetarian'. It's certainly not realistic to thnk we can carry on consuming meat at this rate.
In its context the phrase was used as a way to defend meat-eating as a matter of personal choice, even though we all agree that argument doesn't apply to fox hunting.
Yet our choice deprives other people of their choice. Meat-eating at the level we do it is utterly unsustainable. Such a diet requires too much land, too much water and too much finite resources to ever be available to the many. It is the priviliege of the few, it deprives the poor of the world of their food, (all through the Ethiopian famine of the 80s we were importing their produce as animal feed).
The overwhelming majority of people eat far less meat than us westerners. We have a vast choice in our diet. We do not need to eat animal products. Those who eat meat do it simply because they want to, never because they need to.
As such, the *need* to eat meat is not greater than the need to go fox hunting. It's simply the killing of an animal for human pleasure.
Lemon's suggestion that fox hunting is different because it only results in a dead fox is wrong. It results in a dead fox and people enjoying the result. A steak involves a dead cow and people enjoying the result. Neither need to do it.
Daminxa raises the question of life-saving medicines; that's another issue, because it introduces the necessity element.
The 'third way' element of humane farming has a little merit, but not much. Certianly, the idea that it is 'possible to rear farm animals without them suffering' is untrue. And certainly, present farming methods do not allow anything of the kind. Killing an animal long before the end of its natural life is cruel.
And that's before we go into universal practices even in supposed 'compassionate' farming like killing the 50% of chicks that are male cos they won't grow up to lay eggs, or the taking of male calves from their mothers for slaughter or veal production, or the refusal of the RSPCA to act against it's 'Freedom Food' farmers who contain and abuse animals.
Animal farming necessarily means treating animals as commodity. There are certainly degrees of severity, but all of it is inherantly cruel, especially as it is only done to provide us with luxury foods.
And this still doesn't touch the fact that by whatever method, animal rearing takes colossal quantites of feed, land, water and the related transportation and other resources at a level that is simply not sustainable. As I say, for me that's by far the most powerful argument.
Lemon's further assertion that 'you are not going to change anyones mind on anything by ranting at them' is utterly wrong. All of us got our ideas from others. All of us refine our ideas based on what others have told us. Explaining your point - which is a more accurate term than 'ranting' for Baza's blunt but uninflammatory tone - is *precisely* how you change other people's minds.
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